Brian Cooper, director of sales marketing at Huntington-based marketing firm OpenMoves, gives his tips and tricks on how to bring attention to your blog site.

Cooper: A blogging guide for the perplexed

By: Commentary March 11, 2014Comments Off on Cooper: A blogging guide for the perplexed

By Brian Cooper

Blogging has become increasingly critical to business, as companies vie for both attention and rankings in a competitive and cluttered online world.

Ranking in search-engine results is primarily a factor of relevance and authority. Actively blogging about current topics and issues relevant to your market is one of the surest ways of increasing both.

Even if you know what you should be writing about, the actual construction of a blog post can be confusing. The key is to structure posts in a way that will engage visitors, boost the time they spend on your blog and increase the likelihood they will share your posts.

A blog post has several goals it needs to accomplish. It should attract and hold the reader’s attention; provide real and shareable value; and get the reader to take an action, like clicking, commenting or visiting your main site.

Here is our best advice on how to achieve those results:

Write a descriptive, engaging and keyword-rich title. Keep it to roughly eight words and use strategic keywords to ensure that it’s relevant to searches on your topic. An effective title will also catch the eye of someone casually skimming the site, whereas a cute or clever title may not be meaningful. Describe the post using multiple keywords and address the reader’s needs, and the user will quickly engage.

Summarize with a sub-head. Consider using a sub-headline at the beginning as a one-sentence summary of what the post is about. Mix in some personality while embellishing on your title with additional keywords.

Address the reader in the body content. Each post should address the need of the visitors and the focus should always be on them. Visitors have come to your blog because they have a question or need some specific information; be informative in your writing, be friendly in your tone and speak directly to the visitor to make a connection. Phrases like “here are some tips you can use” or “your team will love this” work nicely.

Remember that your blog is a dialogue. Avoid sounding like a commercial or a sales pitch. Write an informative post that educates. This will always be more successful than a list of sales specials and shipping options. The visitor always wants to know what’s in it for them; show them.

Length doesn’t necessarily matter. The length of each blog post can be flexible. Initially, aim for approximately 500 words. When you show the reader that you respect the time commitment required to read your post, it will help you retain visitors. If you have a lot to offer and if you keep slinging value, then length won’t matter. Once written, edit and re-edit your post for clarity and remove unnecessary verbiage that doesn’t move the post along.

Don’t forget internal linking. Linking to related posts on your site will turn new visitors on to content they may have missed and will help those posts rank better. It will also keep visitors on the site longer.

And don’t forget external linking. Linking to other sites from your posts is not a bad thing. Sure, we want to keep people on the blog as long as we can, but introducing your visitors to related websites establishes your blog as an authority. You are in the know. Your visitors want to be in the know, too, so they will come back. Strategic linking also helps you build relationships with websites you may want to be associated with – and the traffic may be reciprocal, if they like what you’re writing about and link back.

Pick the right images. The images on your blog should be consistent in their size and placement. Images should be large enough to see, relevant and, preferably, not stock images. Don’t forget to name the image files with meaningful keywords and to use ALT text in the code to describe them.

Your success depends on value. The success of a blog relies on its perceived value. Quality, keyword-rich content will increase your traffic and retain visitors, and the more you provide original, quality content, the more people will share your posts, interact with you and become return visitors. Your goal is to earn their trust – when visitors trust you, they’ll spend money with you.

Cooper is director of search marketing at OpenMoves, a Huntington-based email and search-marketing firm.